Saturday, July 27, 2013

As many of you know we are two weeks from departing for the country of Botswana in southern Africa where we will serve as Peace Corps volunteers for 26 months. We are very excited for this opportunity and have started this blog as a way to record our experiences and stay in touch with friends and family. We will do our best to post as often as we can, which will most likely depend on the availability and reliability of internet access. There are many unknowns as we get ready to make this journey. We don't
yet know where our site placement within the country will be, and
although we have formal job titles we will know much more about our
daily living and working conditions once we arrive in country. This
blog will be a place for us to update you all on those juicy
details. Please add comments and questions as I know we will love hearing from you all!

We have dreamed of living and working abroad for many years and are so happy to be going to Botswana. Our goals are to immerse ourselves in a new and different culture, learn a new language (Setswana), and make lasting relationships with the people of our host community. Our development work will be focused on addressing the HIV/Aids epidemic in one of the most affected countries in the world. In the next post we will describe in more detail our specific job assignments and the history of Peace Corps in Botswana. I wanted to end this post with the Peace Corps Mission Statement.

The Peace Corps Mission

The Peace Corps was established by and act of Congress in 1961 to promote world peace and friendship through the service of American Volunteers abroad. In adapting to changing needs around the world, the Peace Corps remains guided by three goals from the original Peace Corps Act:

1. To help the people of intersted countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.

2. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.

3. To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of all Americans.